The Middle East channel has continued to evolve and expand extraordinarily in recent years.

The Middle East channel has continued to evolve and expand extraordinarily in recent years. In the competitive IT world, resellers and retailers are always looking to partner with the best IT vendors and distributors for any given product or technology.

Partnering with the top echelon not only helps reseller partners to run their day-to-day operations more smoothly, but it also casts a positive glow on their own consultancies.

The channel in this region still retains an understanding rarely seen in other markets around the globe.

While the market continues to evolve and vendors or distributors may have changed names or merged, the intent of the ‘Channel Champions Top 50’ list has remained the same. The list aims to highlight the works of executives that are playing a pivotal role in the development of the Middle East IT market and whose actions have impacted the channel community by going that extra mile.

The top 50 honours executives at vendor and distributor companies who are influential in the channel and go out of their way to assist channel partners to win deals, embrace new technology and business models, and grow their businesses.

The top 50 list also recognises executives whose individual influence on channel partner businesses in the Middle East is having a positive bearing.

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So, how did we go about selecting these top 50 channel executives? Well, we set ourselves a few ground rules for a start. First of all, the executives featured in the 2011 list are employed by vendors or distributors, the main companies that resellers and retailers depend on for the success of their businesses in the regional IT market.

Although the aim is to get as many executives as we possibly can from around the Middle East, many of the executives on our list are based out of the UAE, although all of them have wider roles covering the entire MENA region and beyond.

Like last year, we have kept to the policy of selecting one executive per company, even though the scale of presence of some companies could probably have warranted more than one entry for some organisations.

Furthermore, when selecting our top 50 executives, we have attempted to take into account the influence of each individual and their company over the broader Middle East channel, the contribution to development, enhancement of expertise and visibility.

Influence is hard to define. It is as much about the future as the present; it’s as much about leaders like CEOs, MDs, channel directors, business unit heads and channel managers whose ideas are moving channel partners’ businesses in new directions as about those whose actions are impacting the Middle East IT industry today in different ways.

Although we can only feature 50 executives from the region’s channel, we are aware that there are more ‘channel champions’ beyond the ones we have selected. Nevertheless, the list offers a solid guide to the who’s who in the Middle East channel market. In the pages that follow, Channel Middle East showcases the 2011 top 50 channel pioneers.